At the beginning of the year 2014, Contemporary Literature Press continues the James Joyce Lexicography Series started in November 2011. The present 19 volumes contextualize and linearize the second part of Frances Boldereff's Reading Finnegans Wake, initially published as far back as 1959. Our series focuses on Boldereff's own obsessions as to what the reader might recognize time and again in Joyce's last text: HCE, Dear Dirty Dublin, Jonathan Swift and his Stella, Chapelizod, 1132, Finn MacCool... Boldereff explained that she was interested in "words of Irish reference only", words which could "establish the Irish identity". She made a point of never referring to "Joyce's meaning". As she herself put it, "Joyce has not written a history, nor a study-book of any kind; he is conveying his wonderful excitement over his country."

According to Frances Boldereff, then, James Joyce evokes Ireland emotionally: she chose Irishness as a possible key to Finnegans Wake.

Her choice of Ireland could hardly go wrong.

Her explanation of this choice, however, does not sound quite right.

Finnegans Wake research began a few years after Joyce's death. CLP has made most of it available to its readers:

In 1944, Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson published A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. The year 1959 brought no less than four books at once: Boldereff, James Atherton with a Study of Literary Allusions, Matthew Hodgart and Mabel Worthington with Song, and Richard Ellmann with James Joyce's life. In 1962 and 1963, Clive Hart published both Structure and Motif and A Concordance to Finnegans Wake. After the year 1965 there was an explosion of Lexicons: among others, Dounia Bunis Christiani came with Scandinavian Elements (1965), while Helmut Bonheim published his Lexicon of the German (1967). Adaline Glasheen compiled a Census of the characters (1977). In 1978, Louis Mink published his Gazetteer.

Boldereff noticed one essential fact, which she never carried to an ultimate conclusion, though: the harder Joyce fought to become a citizen of Europe and a speaker of all languages, the more acutely his small Ireland stuck to every fibre of his mind. Ireland was the one, the inescapable Earworm of Joyce's intelligence: it haunted him in spite of himself, at all times.

We are now publishing Boldereff's Glosses because we feel they are pointing the reader in the right direction: Earworms are a possible Trojan horse.

1 January 2014

C. George Sandulescu & Lidia Vianu

Joyce Lexicography. Volumes 58-76. Boldereff's Glosses Linearized, edited by C. George Sandulescu, and redacted by Lidia Vianu are formally launched on Tuesday 7 January 2014. The volumes are available for consultation and downloading on receipt of this Press Release, at the following internet address:

If you want to have all the information you need about Finnegans Wake, including the full text of Finnegans Wake, line-numbered, go to the personal site Sandulescu Online, at the following internet address:http://sandulescu.perso.monaco.mc/

If you want to have all the information you need about Finnegans Wake, including the full text of Finnegans Wake, line-numbered, go to the personal site Sandulescu Online, at the following internet address:http://sandulescu.perso.monaco.mc/

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